


you caught the light

by notjodieyet



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Bugs & Insects, Emotionally Repressed Twelfth Doctor, F/M, Gift Giving, POV Twelfth Doctor - Nardole (Derogatory), Pre-Monks Trilogy, Star Trek References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-08
Updated: 2021-01-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:08:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28633020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notjodieyet/pseuds/notjodieyet
Summary: the doctor takes bill to see pretty fireflies and brings them to his Friend In The Vault (homoerotic).beta'ed, per usual, by the wonderful @petercapaldish on tumblr (@androktasia on AO3!)a gift for the lovely @sydneygremlins (on tumblr & AO3)! much apologies for the delay!
Relationships: Twelfth Doctor & Bill Potts, Twelfth Doctor/Missy
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28





	you caught the light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sydneygremlins](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sydneygremlins/gifts).



Bill sits on her chair haphazardly, one leg pulled to her chest, the other propped on the Doctor’s desk, her combat boots flaking dirt onto the Doctor’s second-favorite dictionary. Her eyes are unfocused, staring at something behind the Doctor’s left shoulder, and she taps a quick rhythm against the wood of the desk. 

The Doctor pauses his casual lecture on Bill’s word choice in her most recent essay. “Are you paying attention?”

Bill’s expression doesn’t change, her tapping doesn’t slow.

“Hello?” he asks, leaning forward to squint at her face. She looks perfectly healthy, perfectly present, and his admittedly weak telepathic attempts to check for disruption in her brainwaves find nothing. 

She blinks, startles to life. “Hey,” she says, sweeping her leg off the desk. “Sorry. Got a bit distracted, I think.”

“Are you…” he starts tentatively, brushing the dirt off his dictionary. “All right?”

“Fine?” she says, the word more a question than a statement. “I just haven’t really been sleeping, you know? It’s exam week. And…” She waves a hand at the essay in the Doctor’s hand. “Yeah.”

“Right. Why don’t you head home, get an early night? We can pick up tomorrow. Really. I told Nardole we could watch  _ Bake-Off _ tonight, anyway.” This is a lie: he’d promised Missy  _ Bake-Off,  _ not Nardole, but Bill doesn’t have to know anything more about the Vault than the vague fragments she’s pried from him already. “Go on, then!” he says, making shooing motions with his hands.

“I’m really alright,” Bill assures him. “It’s just stress.”

She doesn’t  _ look _ all right; her skin hangs in bags under her eyes and her eyebrows are furrowed, leaving a crease on her forehead the Doctor aches to smooth away. “I doubt we’ll get anything else done today. It’s not—” Something occurs to him, and he stands suddenly, dropping Bill’s essay on the desk. “Come on,” he says, striding towards the TARDIS and pushing open the door.

“Won’t Nardole notice?”

“I sent him to sit in on a meeting in my place. We’ll be back before he knows it, promise.” He holds out a hand, palm up. “Fireflies,” he says, simply.

“What?”

The Doctor grins. “Fireflies.”

* * *

As the triple Hirutian moons set, the Doctor finds a stream which trickles over gently glowing rocks, the diluted light flickering across Bill’s face. She squints at the stream, the forest beyond, the blurry silhouette of the spired capital in the background. 

“You said fireflies,” she pouts.

He sits on the dewy grass, patting the ground beside him. “Give them a moment.” 

“All right,” she says, sitting beside him. She waits only a few heartsbeats. “I don’t see anything—”

In his peripheral vision, a small pink pinpoint of light flashes on, and off again. Another, just beside Bill. Another, against the grass. Before long, the night is lighting up with the glow of Hirutia’s famed fireflies, big and bright. 

“Oh!” Bill laughs, reaches out as if to close her hand around one, but it darts away too quickly. “They’re pink,” she says. “They’re pink fireflies.”

Watching her with a soft smile, the Doctor sees the exhaustion and stress momentarily drop away from Bill’s face, the crease in her brow replaced by much preferred smile lines around her mouth and eyes. “I can get a jar for you, if you like.”

“Wouldn’t that be cruel? To take them away from here?” 

“I’ll bring them back after you’re gone.” He fishes a jar out of his jacket pocket. After losing several sonics to useless human tailoring, he’d spent ages engineering a new coat that was bigger on the inside. Presenting it to Nardole and Missy, he’d crowed,  _ “Pocket dimensions!”  _ to which Missy had sniped,  _ “Why didn’t you just sew bigger ones?” _ and Nardole had eyed suspiciously, asking,  _ “What exactly do you plan to use those for?” _

Ah well, everyone’s a critic. 

He passes the jar to Bill. “Have fun.”

Bill clambers to her feet, her eyes flicking uncertainly between the Doctor and the fireflies. She reaches out a hand and waits, standing very still. They zap around her arm and hand, until one lands on her fingertip. 

“Doctor, look!” she gasps.

He watches it crawl up her index finger, pausing at the knuckle. “Much friendlier than the bugs we have on Earth,” he says, and he only notices his mistake after the words are gone, dissipated into the cool night air:  _ we _ , not  _ you _ . As if Earth was his birthplace, his favorite home. 

Bill slides her hand into the jar, placing the firefly inside, and it loops lazy circles within the glass. “What are they like?” she asks, holding her hand out again. “The people here.”

He has to think for a moment – it’s been a long time since his last visit. “Nice, I think. Scaly. Prone to revolution. Lovely motels.”

“They have motels on other planets?” Another firefly settles on her, this time landing on the meat of her thumb. She tips it into the jar. 

The Doctor shrugs and lies back, looking up at her, a small stone pressing into his shoulder blade. He shifts. “They have motels everywhere.” He watches the fireflies above him, remembers what it was like to see the universe as an open highway instead of a forbidden party, remembers the rush of freedom instead of guilt trapped hefty in his chest. (The guilt was always there. He’s fooling himself, and he knows it, but it’s a pleasant dishonesty. To think that it was all okay before the Vault.) 

“Thank you,” says Bill, eventually.

“Home?” the Doctor asks. He sits up, takes the jar of five pink alien insects. 

She nods.

* * *

Bill goes home, after an awkward waving of arms that the Doctor realizes too late is an attempt at a hug, and he’s left watching the fireflies in the jar on his desk, sipping from a cup of miserably tepid tea. 

“Good day, sir?”

The Doctor doesn’t look up. He makes a mental note to send Nardole for booty shorts with the words  _ BOTTOM TEXT  _ across the rear. “Where’s the microwave?”

“Those aren’t Earth bugs.” The Doctor can hear Nardole’s pacing, his tuneless hum. “You went off-world.”

The Doctor doesn’t respond, simply stirs his tea again, watches the ripples spin out towards the edges of the cup. He looks to meet Nardole’s eyes. “Dismissed,” he says.

“You can’t dismiss me,” says Nardole. “I’m not one of your students. You can’t boss me around. You—”

“Dismissed.”

“She wouldn’t like this,” he warns. “Your late missus.”

The Doctor stands, his hand closing around the jar, every last scrap of his self-control working to keep his face steady and his words measured. “ _ Dismissed. _ ” 

Nardole lingers for a moment, his face doing something the Doctor doesn’t care to decode. “There’s one in the faculty lounge,” he says snippily, before stepping into the TARDIS. 

The Doctor watches him go, tells himself he doesn’t care. The room feels strangely empty after the police box door closes anyway. 

He tucks the jar under his arm and leaves. 

* * *

At first glance, the Vault is empty, a chill in the air, and the Doctor wonders for a moment if Missy has finally tired of him and made her escape. His footsteps echo in the empty space as he looks for her, finding only air at the piano, the kitchenette, the canvas she’s leaned against the wall to paint tiny smiley face emojis across.

He finds her curled up on the bed, a blanket wrapped around her, knees drawn up to her chest. “Doctor,” she says as he approaches, a pale hand reaching out of her hiding place. “It is you, isn’t it?”

The Doctor takes her hand, running the pad of his thumb across her knuckles. He sets the jar on the floor. “Hello,” he says.

“Your footsteps,” she says, answering an unasked question. “You’re not scared of me. Your boyfriend is.”

He doesn’t bother to correct her. “I brought you something.”

With the hand not gently held by the Doctor, Missy pulls back the blanket from her head, blinking at him with those bright eyes. “You spoil me,” she says, lightly, giving his hand a squeeze. 

“We’ll see. Where’s the light switch?” 

She raises an eyebrow, points to the wall. “If this is a set-up to a joke, don’t bother.”

“Better.” The Doctor lets go of her hand with significant regret, finding the switch next to Missy’s bedside table, and flicking it. The room is plunged into darkness, the fireflies casting warm shadows across the angles of Missy’s face. He makes his way back to her side, cracking his shin on the bedframe, garnering a muffled snicker. He unscrews the jar.

One by one, the fireflies crawl up the side of the glass before launching themselves out of their prison. 

The Doctor climbs onto the bed next to Missy, and she drapes her blanket over him wordlessly, leaning into him. “Bill caught them,” he says.

“I mean, they’re practically tiny light-up Skechers,” says Missy. At his silence: “The trainers for toddlers, dear.” 

“Oh.”

Missy giggles. It’s the first positive sound he’s heard from her in weeks, outside of singing along to dramatic pop songs, and he thinks that must be a good sign. “I can’t believe you stole wildlife for me.”

“I’m going to take them back,” says the Doctor. “Once you’re done.”

She hums. “Books. A book or two might be nice. Something fun – quit with the ethics, honestly. I’ve had my way with half the philosophers in your last pile and –” Here, she turns her head to meet him with a steady gaze – “let me tell you, when Hobbes said life was ‘nasty, brutish and short,’ he really meant it.”

The Doctor chokes down a laugh. “I very much disapprove of this kind of language.”

“Prude,” says Missy.

“Modest,” says the Doctor, but he can’t keep a straight face at that. His hand drifts to Missy’s ear, tucking away a stray strand that’s fallen loose from today’s messy updo. He can feel her jaw tilt up, see her lips part in the near-complete darkness. “Mistress—”

“Mm. Doctor?”

His finger brushes across the curve of her cheek, until he can feel her breath tickle the skin of his hand. He lets himself lean closer. “You’re—” 

Missy clicks her tongue, impatient. “Yes?”

The Doctor shakes his head, snapping back into a proper frame of consciousness. “I’m glad you like them,” he says. “The fireflies. I’m glad. I’m sorry.” He pulls away from her and grabs for one of them. It flutters away out of his reach, so he holds his hand steady and waits.

“Really?” 

“I’m sorry, Missy.” Firefly after firefly after firefly land on his hand and he tips them back into the jar. “You liked them, though?”

“I did.” There is a rustling, a shifting of shadows, as Missy presumably lies flat on her stomach. “Tell your pet thank-you.”

The Doctor crawls out of the bed to flick the light on again. “Bill. Her name is Bill.”

“Is expressing gratitude not enough? Must I learn your students’ names?” She picks a pin out of her hair, and another, sending curls bouncing down around her shoulders.

“Just the one.” 

“Maybe I’ll try.” Another pin, another, another. She has so much hair, the Doctor thinks. “Tell Nardole I’ll take breakfast late tomorrow. I’m going to watch a season of  _ The Next Generation _ and I’ll be sleeping in.”

“It was good to see you,” the Doctor starts. 

“You can stay, if you like,” says Missy. “I know you’re fond of the robot.”

The Doctor is halfway through her bedroom doorway, but he lingers at that. “Data,” he says. “Do you have popcorn?” 

“I can make some. With butter and salt.” She crooks a finger at him, shakes her hair out, in all of its bushy and curly glory. 

“I need to take the fireflies back,” says the Doctor, pointing at the jar in his hand. 

“And then…”

“And then I’ll watch  _ Star Trek  _ with you,” the Doctor allows, letting himself soften. “With popcorn.” 

Missy smiles, teeth barely bared, and he feels the same way as when a cat is fond of him—as if a small, vicious predator has decided to momentarily trust him and enjoy his company. “Hurry back,” she says.

“I’ll do my best.” 

* * *

Missy tosses a kernel of popcorn into her mouth, catching it deftly between her teeth. The Doctor watches her, warm, and she lifts a piece to his lips, pushing it into his mouth with a gentle tap. “Thoughts?”

“It’s popcorn,” says the Doctor. Missy is pressed up against him, his head resting on the top of hers, their limbs tangled together. He plays with a strand of her hair. “It’s good popcorn,” he adds, to please her. 

She snuggles into his side, satisfied. “Thank you for the fireflies.”

The Doctor nudges her. “Look at me,” he says.

“What?” She looks up, an eyebrow raised, a smirk tugging at her lips. “Critique?”

The Doctor tilts his head, leans forward ever so slightly, an invitation. A continuation. Missy lights up, darting forward without warning, her mouth landing on the Doctor’s. Her kissing is so often soft, sweet, as if she’s assuring him that she is happy, she is okay, she is safe, but today her teeth scrape against his lip, her nails scratch his wrist. 

She hovers a breath away from him. “You missed the space part.”

“What?”

“The final frontier part. You like to say it along with him.”

“What?” says the Doctor again, tearing his eyes from her mouth, the lipstick smeared slightly. 

“The—never mind,” she says. 

She kisses him again.


End file.
